Dedication

DEDICATION


“. . . to see those men whom God has placed above kings and ministers by giving them a mission to fulfill, rather than a position to occupy.”

Alexandre Dumas




These are magnanimous words but fatherhood is noble business. My father, a farmer, never read The Count of Monte Cristo, but he loved to read and to learn and he encouraged me to do the same.
I spoke with my father every day by phone during the last three years of his life. He always ended each conversation by saying, “I love you more than yesterday, but less than tomorrow.”
My father was not a rugged man, but he had the strength and courage to say what so many rough-hewn men dare to think. Each time he said “I love you,” he heaped diamonds, pearls and rubies into the treasure chest of my heart, and I am a rich man because of him.
Therefore, I dedicate this book to Harold Martin, a man who fulfilled a duty that some “great” men shirk. Nevertheless, the most honorable achievement for any man entrusted with the care of a child is the one in which my father excelled: fatherhood.

Foreward

FOREWORD

There is much good sleep in an old story.

German Proverb



“. . .Benny’s aimin’ to play all of these tapes when I’m gone. I hope they’re interestin’ to him.”

Harold Martin, Audio Journal


My father’s favorite book, which he read eight times, was Gone with the Wind. Wistful by nature, a lover of history, he, like me, would have loved to have a window through which he could look back to the past, particularly his own past. He spoke often and lovingly about the days of his youth, and I loved to listen to him.
During the last summers of his life, my father would sit often in a 1950s-era green metal lawn chair in his front yard on White House Road in Moneta. He would watch in awe as hundreds of cars a day would speed down a road that he recalled was once covered with gravel.
I never thought I would live to see a day when there wouldn’t be a single mule in this community, he once said from his perch, gesturing to the horse-drawn plow that still sits to this day under one of the willow trees. Just like that civilization of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, my father’s way of life was gone with the wind; the Moneta that he remembered as a farming community had been slowly but steadily swept away and engulfed by the larger Smith Mountain Lake community. Even the little hamlet of Moneta was all boarded up by the time he died. It resembled a ghost town in a Hollywood Western.
“We are a resort town now,” a store owner casually remarked to me during a conversation in early 2006.

My father told me much about the days when mules did the work of tractors and a trip to Bedford was a special treat. A raconteur with a dry sense of humor, he also had an uncanny ability to mimic some of the more comical characters in the community and even when I was a teenager, when I was sure that I was much smarter than he, I found his stories and reminisces both interesting and funny.
After my mother died in 1996 at the age of 56 from heart disease, my father’s own heart condition seemed to worsen quickly, so I began to write down on paper every funny story, joke, word of wisdom, wistful remark and farm fact that he ever told me. I gave him a cassette recorder to use when he felt inspired to share a story, and some of his remarks, now digitally preserved, appear in this work in italics.
For several years after his death, I sifted through musty briefcases, desks, dresser drawers and other nooks and crannies and discovered to be true what I had long suspected: my father was a packrat. However, the photos, receipts, advertisements and other bits of memorabilia speak volumes of both my father and his times.
I hope subsequent generations will not forget that Moneta was once a farming community. Though this hamlet has been transformed into one of Virginia’s premier vacation destinations and a resort town, many people who call it home now do not remember the graveled country roads and soft drinks in glass bottles bought from general stores. Surely they know little, if anything, of Dr. Sam Rucker and the small tool shed-size building where he treated patients like me as late as the 1970s. For them, I share some memories of another day. For them, I say, “Come and look through my window for a while.”

Someday, few people will remember that “Downtown” Moneta” was known once as the area of the village at the closed rail crossing, while “Uptown” Moneta” was further along State Route 122, past the library and post office, near the Shop Rite Grocery Store. This town had a bona fide country doctor, milk plant, post office, snack bar, train station and several general stores. So, here is my contribution, in words and pictures, to my hometown’s past, a past that should not be forgotten while we are enjoying the bounty of the present.
Dear Dad, you have no idea how interesting “the tales” have been!

A Hollywood Movie Set

CHAPTER 1

A HOLLYWOOD MOVIE SET

“Fame is a bee.
It has a song
It has a sting.
Ah, too, it has a wing”

Emily Dickenson


Even Tinseltown couldn’t save my hometown.
In the early 1990s, Touchstone Pictures filmed a portion of the movie, “What About Bob?,” which featured Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss, in Moneta, Virginia Who could have predicted that my school bus stop, an old, rickety, turn-of-the-century general store, which sagged mournfully under the weight of its’ many years, would ever achieve cinematic fame? How did a major motion-picture company ever find this little place for its film?
Moneta’s brief fame, demise, and, now, resurrection, is due to Smith Mountain Lake. This 500-mile shoreline body of water was created by Appalachian Power Company in the early 1960s when a dam was built at Smith Mountain Gap. Though the primary goal of the project was the production of electricity, a recreation destination was obviously expected to be a by-product of the effort. When the $66 million dollar project was completed in 1966, yacht clubs, marinas, public boat launches, an airport and a state park followed. People came from all over the United States both to relax and to live in one of the surrounding counties, giving credence to a truth purported in another film, “Field of Dreams”: “If you build it, they will come.”

Until the late 1990s, State Route 122 was intersected by the railroad tracks of the old Virginia Railroad. Those tracks essentially cut Moneta in half. Due to increased traffic by a rising population and the danger of fire and rescue squad service being blocked from parts of the community when trains passed, the Virginia State Department of Transportation closed the railroad crossing and constructed a bypass for Route 122 around the little village. Quaint little Moneta was gone.
Though I grew up only a few miles from the lake’s shore, I never learned how to swim. I rode a boat twice. I fished more in the Rock Castle Creek that bisects our farm than I did on Smith Mountain Lake. Yet the lake was an important part of my experience growing up on what had been a 140-acre tract of land my father dubbed The Kasey Seats Farm. Tourists, boats and water skis meshed in my boyhood experiences with tractors, barns and milk cows.
Thank goodness for those tourists who helped sustain our family meat-packing business and other area enterprises! Once, a patron in our store made a prophesy long before the bypass came through town: “You’ better hope that this place stays a secret, or so many people will move in here that one day you won’t be able to recognize it.” She was right. Though Moneta remained no more than an abandoned movie set for a few years after Disney packed up, a new Moneta is, as of this writing, under construction.
Long before he died, my father gave up trying to recognize everyone who traveled along White House Road. When he was a child, he said, you might see only three or four cars travel the road each day. He often recounted the time when his younger brother, Jack, who, when hearing a car approach Ayers’s School, which was a one-room schoolhouse on White House Road on the site where my Granddaddy Martin would later build a home, raced first from one window to watch the sole automobile pass until it was completely out of sight.

Probably, White House Road would still be a relatively quiet, though paved, little country road had it not been for Smith Mountain Lake. Certainly, Moneta would not have been known by Hollywood had it not been for it. Those first tourists who came here to boat and fish were customers in all of our businesses and have become our neighbors and friends. Now, several generations removed, they, too, are part of the rich history of this area. A new town is being built all along the bypass, and another generation of residents will live, work and die here.
I grow a bit wistful, though, when I realize that the days are gone when travelers on Route 608 would sit in their cars at that old railroad crossing and wait for the train to pass. When I was a boy, I looked forward to hearing a train whistle as we approached the crossing because it meant we would have to sit and wait for it to pass. It was fun to count the cars as they sped by, to watch the tracks bounce up and down under the weight of their heavy load, and to anticipate its end so that I could wave at the man in the caboose.
Though there are few visible reminders of the Moneta I recall from those days I caught the school bus at the old general store, the railroad tracks are still where they were over a half-century ago. The trains still come through Moneta, and they make the same familiar, wonderful sound now as they did then. The people I remember from those days are gone, but several generations of non-farmers have lived here since Smith Mountain was built and they have respect for the areas’ history and its’ farming past. Moneta will have a new generation of shops, restaurants, and even a “Mayberry”-style community. So, instead of a ghost town with boarded up shops, Moneta is thriving. Just like those heavy rail cars carrying their load down the tracks, life here keeps rolling right along, too.
I wonder, though, if TouchStone Pictures producers could find a suitable backdrop to film another movie in this area now that the picturesque hamlet of Moneta is gone. Only time will tell if the capricious bee of Fame will find another suitable flower in this lovely section of Bedford County upon which to rest. It is one sting that this community would, probably, love to have again.

A Man of the Land

CHAPTER 2


A MAN OF THE LAND

“If a man owns a little property, that property is him, it’s part of him, and it’s like him. If he owns property only so he can walk on it and handle it and be sad when it isn’t doing well, and feel fine when the rain falls on it, that property is him, and some way he’s bigger because he owns it.”

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath


“This story begins some 63 years ago, approximately December 10, 1932. That’s when we moved over to the Dabney Place. I remember the day very well. Willard, Jack and me (my father’s brothers) got off the truck down here at my grandmother’s place at the foot of the hill here and the rest of them went over to the farm to start unpackin. We got so wild that along about 11 or 12 0'clock, our grandmother walked us through the woods up by what is now Jackie Tuck’s place over to the farm.
We lived there for 25 years and had a pretty good time there. We had plenty of food. We raised wheat and corn and pork. A fellow asked my brother, Willard, one time how we made it through the Depression. Willard said that we didn’t even know it was going on because we had this farm and plenty to eat and our daddy had a job at the American Viscose in Roanoke. That lasted until the late 1950s when the plant closed down.
Mr. Hurt and some different men lived on the farm and helped us. Finally, Aubrey Krantz came and stayed quite a few years. We lived a pretty normal life. Later on, Daddy got sick and had diabetes. He sold the farm and moved over to the Kasey Place.
The Kasey Place was sold two or three times. It seemed that all of the Martins owned it. Finally, me and Willard got it in the late 40s, then I bought it from him in 1948. We lived there about 5 years. I remember how his first wife, Ann, used to cry because she was from the city and had never lived in the country before, but she pulled through.
One of the things Mama Jirdie (my father’s paternal grandmother) told me was that where our house is now was once called the Kasey Seats. There were church services that went on here on Sunday evenings.”

The Audio Diary of Harold Martin



My father had, as all farmers do, reached down many times and grasped a clump of earth in his hands, held it, contemplated it, and felt a kinship with it. Whether the soil was dry because of drought or rich and fertile due to prayed-for rain, he was one with the land. At the end of his life, he was able to understand just how much he had loved it.
One summer afternoon in 1995, while sitting in the front yard under one of the willow trees, my father recorded a bare-bones account of his life on the Kasey Seats Farm. The steady pace of the July tourist traffic can be heard in the tape’s background. Since my father, unbeknownst to him, lived by the Shakespeare dictum in Henry V that men of few words are the best men, he left out a few details about his life.
During his lifetime, my father moved only about five three miles from his birthplace and he enjoyed only a few travels away from home. He took a seventh-grade class trip to Washington, DC in 1938 (with the requisite $5.00 in spending money); he traveled to Tennessee several times to visit his brother, Willard and while there visited parts of Kentucky. Once, with my mother, he took a bus trip through the Pennsylvania Dutch country. When he worked with my grandfather, who was a construction superintendent for a large firm, as a timekeeper and general laborer on various high school construction sites, he worked in Danville, Blacksburg and Culpeper, Virginia.
My father was a farmer, but not a rugged man in the image of a John Wayne or a Matt Dillon. Rather, he was a John-Boy Walton who did not pursue his college dream. He held education in the highest regard from his early teenage years until his graduation from Huddleston High School as Class Valedictorian in 1943. For my father, teaching was the most noble of all professions. He taught Sunday School for 30 years and spent hours each week preparing his lesson. He was an avid student of Thomas Jefferson’s life and the era of the antebellum South. He relished trips to Monticello, Appomattox and the Booker T. Washington National Monument.

My father’s youthful ambition was to teach. My Grandma Martin and her sister, Sally, attended Radford State Teacher’s College, now Radford University, in 1921 for two six-week summer sessions to earn first-grade teaching certificates. Upon graduation, my Grandma Martin came home and taught at Ayers’ School, a typical one-room schoolhouse that was composed of the first seven grades. In my grandmother’s spare time, she and her sister taught their father, Bruce Thomas (B. T.) Huffman how to read and to write. My father loved to tell me this story because he thought it was an act of great love, and he kept my Grandma Martin’s teaching certificate until his death.
Often, my father would recall that his high school years included the chores of helping his siblings with homework and corresponding with their teachers when necessary. He would lull his sister, Sue, to sleep while studying, rocking her crib with his foot while he rocked himself back and forth in a rocking chair. In 1943, the erstwhile student, who dreamed of becoming a Latin teacher, set out with his high school diploma and valedictorian award to pursue his dream.
During his senior year at Huddleston High, my father said he wrote to “every college in the South” to obtain admission information. But, for a meek, sensitive farm boy, traveling out of state would have been akin to traveling out of the country. Instead, he opted for nearby National Business College in downtown Roanoke. He tried to commute from home, but the combination of a long drive on winding country roads, the farm work that awaited him when he got home, and a youthful lack of self-confidence overwhelmed him. Soon, he left school.
For the rest of his life, my father recalled his last day at National Business College. He had finished the withdrawal paperwork and was leaving when he encountered one of his professors on a stairwell. A few steps above my father, the teacher looked down and said, “Martin, you’re leaving us already? I’m sorry to hear it.”
“I should have turned around and stayed,” my father often said.

Granddaddy Martin, though, felt he had made the right decision. He had wanted his son to be at home on the farm like the other boys in the community. Now my father would be where he should be, “where he belonged.” With Granddaddy’s help, my father bought his farm, which was originally 140 acres, and he built a dairy barn. Soon, he was milking a herd twice a day, seven days each week.
But the Coble Milk Plant in Moneta (where Lake Christian Ministries is now located) eventually closed, and my father, like his father before him, had to find work off the farm to support his family. He joined the construction firm that employed my maternal grandfather and from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, they worked on elementary and high school job sites in southwest Virginia. When my grandfather was forced to retire due to work-related injuries in 1973, my father found work first at Rubatex Corporation in Bedford (he was laid off after three months) then at Klopman Industries in Bedford. It was his last job at a meat-packing facility in Evington, though, that changed all of our lives.
My Uncle Willard, my father’s oldest brother, had a successful surveying business in Knoxville, Tennessee. Soon after my father took the meat-packing job, Uncle Willard began the difficult task of convincing my father that he should go into business for himself by operating his own slaughterhouse. Uncle Willard even offered to finance the venture. My father, though, proved to be an initial hard sell. Yet, after friends and family helped to convince him that he should take a gamble, my father, after firmly but graciously refusing his brother’s kindness, decided at the age of 50 to roll the dice and give the business a try.
Martin’s Meat Processing opened in 1975. It became a success not only because it met the need of a large number of farming families that still butchered an animal for family consumption, but my father, just like his father before him, was an extrovert. His personality, combined with my mother’s own sociability, was tailor-made for the public, and their business prospered. In later years, as my father prepared to retire, he phased out custom slaughtering to sell retail cuts of meat to the Smith Mountain tourist trade, and both my parents and grandparents made new friends.

When he assumed the nicely fitting role of gentleman farmer and business owner during the last quarter of my father’s life, he finally became comfortable with the path his life had taken. He loved to talk about farming and farming techniques. He was fascinated by Thomas Jefferson’s farm at Monticello and how the President had made wise use of his resources. He made soap with beef fat and lye and sold it to customers in his store. He loved to explain to them how tobacco and corn was grown and harvested, how to raise cattle and when to plant certain vegetables for a garden. He loved to regal them with farming stories from the days before tractors and hay balers.
My father had taken a gamble when most of us have lost the energy to take one. He had taken a huge bet, though, and won. Armed with a strong religious faith, sustained by the help of a loving brother, family and wonderful customers, he had achieved a comfortable level of success. He would always regret not fulfilling his youthful ambitions, but he had been offered a second chance to make a living on the Kasey Seats farm and he did not waste it.
Farming, Dwight Eisenhower writes, looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field. My father dreamed of using a pencil instead of plow but he let his life take another turn. However, his sacrifice, fight and struggle on his land gave him a love for the land and, eventually, a love for the life that he chose. He was proud that he, too, like Jefferson, was a farmer. “I have done what I came here to do,” he told me several months before he died. He was telling me that his life’s work was over. But, he was also satisfied by his life. My father was satisfied, too, that his hard work had given his son the opportunity to use the pencil he did not get to use.

A VIEW FROM THE PORCH

“Nothing impresses the mind with a deeper feeling of loneliness than to tread the silent and deserted scene of former throng and pageant.”

Washington Irving


While visiting my father and grandmother one Sunday afternoon in the late 1990s , I told my father that I wanted to leave the city and build a home near the Kasey House (more on this in a moment). I would make the daily one-hour commute to my job in Roanoke with WVTF Public Radio, raise a few head of cattle, have a big garden every year, and cut firewood for the stove I would have in my spacious basement. Patiently, my father would listen to me dream aloud while we sat at the kitchen table, and then he made what was for me a curious observation about my future:
“Just remember that when I’m gone, this place won’t mean the same to you.@
I couldn’t understand this sentiment because he spoke often and affectionately about the past. Besides, I loved this 98-acre farm in Bedford County, Virginia, and he knew it. I first thought he was trying to convince me yet again that little money was to be made on a small farm, but he had already made and lived that point well over the years: “Its too far to drive every day, and you’ll just wear out your car, and you can’t work in the city and raise cattle in the country, “ were refrains that he could have set to music.
I never learned how to be a farmer. I picked up knowledge by living on a farm, of course, but I never plowed a single row or baled one bale of hay in my lifetime. I never raised a single cow, pig or chicken. What I know about agriculture, I had observed. I had, though, fulfilled his biggest dream for him (and for me), by earning a college degree. I had a good job, too. So, he had no reason to be scared that I wanted to come back home, uneducated, and with no prospects,

to tend a small farm and live in poverty.
“When we left the Dabney Place (the farm where he and his siblings grew up), we never did go back,” he said.
“Daddy, you didn’t have to go back! You can look out the kitchen window and see the Dabney Place from here!” I replied, nearly laughing aloud.
“Just wait and see.”
I will never feel differently about this place, I said to myself. My father and I never mentioned the subject again. I would, though, often recall the conversation. My overambitious farm plans depended on my father being around to “watch over things,” or to make sure I knew what I was doing. He would, I thought, enjoy letting me take over the responsibility of the cattle and the land. While I was at work, he could “put out the fires” that would occasionally crop up. With his experience and his counsel, I would continue a tradition. With him still around, the farm would still feel like home.
However, I did not take into account that my father was no longer able nor had a desire to put out fires. Farming a roughly one hundred-acre farm is always part-time work but a full-time responsibility. Sometimes, cows get through fences and out onto the highway. I would not be able to leave my full-time job in Roanoke to go chase cows in Bedford County. Finally, my plans did not take into account that my wife, Kathy, reared in the Raleigh Court area of Roanoke City, had no desire to live on a farm.
Finally, my fathers’ death ended all of my plans.
On a chilly weekday October afternoon, two months after my father died, I traveled from Roanoke back to his home to meet with a contractor who would replace the decades-old furnace that had worried my father for years (more on that later, too). Soon, my grandmother would take ownership of my boyhood home. Though her own home had fallen into major disrepair since my grandfather died in 1983, her new one needed plenty of work, too.

After my meeting, I went into the living room and sat down. Although there was about an hour of daylight left, I had closed the curtains to give me an extra measure of privacy; there had been many welcome condolence calls and visits lately, but on this day, I craved solitude. But the silence that I encountered this day was foreign, peculiar and unwelcome. Although a huge void had been left in my family when my mother died in 1996, this place had still felt like home.
Just a few weeks ago, my father and I had sat in the kitchen and talked while my grandmother prepared dinner. Now, just a few weeks later, the house was completely empty. My grandmother, who had lived with my parents during the last two years of my mother’s life and almost a year after her death, was now back in her own home and she came over with me only on Sundays to visit with my father. On this afternoon, with her gone, too, though, this place that had once been home was empty for the first time. An odd, unsettling stillness had crept in here; it was the silence that death leaves behind.
A thin layer of dust that had settled on the furniture during the past few months was an odd sight. The familiar smell of the home and its resident had faded away. Almost overnight, it had become just an empty old house that needed a new furnace. I didn’t sit and ponder this silence and this strange place for too long after the contractor left. No sooner than I sat down, I had to get up and leave. Sometimes, silence is not golden.
I walked outside and crossed the field separating my father’s home from the Kasey House. This dilapidated dwelling, which was built in the late 1870's by John Kasey, a former Bedford County government official, has been in the Martin family since 1939, the year my father’s uncle Garland purchased the 98-acre tract of land. After my father became the owner in 1948, he named the farm the Kasey Seats, because in the late 1800's, worship services were held on the very spot he built his home in 1955. The services were held outside, and makeshift pews were
fashioned from old boards laid across blocks and tree stumps.

Several barns and tool sheds were added to the Kasey House plot in the 1950's but they, like the old clapboard home itself, are slowly falling down. Since I was a young boy, I have enjoyed walking over to this farmhouse to stand inside the doorway of the little side porch that leads into the kitchen. From here, I would admire the view of the surrounding countryside that had always been, for me a lovely, peaceful panorama of beautiful pasture and forest. As a teenager, I would dream of the world that lay beyond those trees and dream of the day when I go out to see it.
The Kasey House played a prominent role in several generations of Martins, including mine. My paternal grandparents lived here in the late 1940's before building a house about a mile away, on the same road. Afterwards, my father, his older brother, Willard and his first wife, Ann, lived here briefly. In the early 1960's, after my parents had married, my maternal grandparents moved to the home site and tore down the house’s crumbling front porch and placed a mobile home on the spot.
On this October afternoon, I came to my hideaway to think about my recent loss. Many times over the years I stood here and let my mind wander in all directions while I admired the beautiful landscape and enjoyed the country silence. Now, though, this place was no longer as silent as it was when I was a boy playing in what had once been a front yard, when far less cars traveled White House Road.
Just as my father’s home had been a few months ago, the Kasey Place had once been alive, too. I could almost see my uncle in his cattle truck, pulling up the driveway to unload a new purchase of livestock; my grandfather at work in his tool shed; my mother and grandmother hanging clothes on the line in front of the cherry tree, and my father mowing hay on his tractor. I remember coming home one afternoon from school to find my first bicycle, which was a gift from my Granddaddy Martin, resting on its kick stand in the front yard.

But I saw only death and decay on this October afternoon. Even the Kasey House and my view had lost its appeal. It was now just a ramshackle reminder of a different way of life, in a very different time. I knew nothing was going to bring me solace on this day because I was grieving over my loss, but I also knew my life, and my life here on this farm, had permanently changed.
I went into the house, passed through the kitchen into the parlor, and almost tripped over an old cardboard box. A few old kitchen chairs, an old vacuum cleaner, ironing board, broken cups and saucers, old books, records and toys had cluttered the floor for years. My first bicycle, with three decades of rust on it, was part of the pile, sharing a grave with old magazines, records, and other discarded items from my family’s past.
Of all the junk in the room, the bicycle caught my attention. I remember how excited I was and how much I loved it its bright red color and white stripes. I must have seen that old red bike here a hundred times over the years, but today I saw just a rusted, useless piece of metal, beyond repair and appropriate in its tomb, an old, abandoned farmhouse listing toward the pasture separating it from my fathers’ house. Both its purpose and its time were gone, just like the rest of the junk that littered the parlor floor.
So this is what my father meant when he said the home place would not mean the same to me when he was gone. The past is filled with lots of old things that you just cannot or do not want to keep. We cannot or should not want to relive our past, but instead we should desire to live for today.
I looked around the parlor of this old farmhouse and was struck by the contrast from the living room I had just left. My fathers’s house use needed some work before my grandmother could move in, but, compared to what I was looking at now, the thin layer of dust on the lamps and the television didn’t seem so bad after all. Yes, the furnace needed replacing, the floors needed some work and the bathroom needed a complete makeover, too, but at least it was not as bad as this! Furthermore, my grandmother’s new home had all its windows and was not listing to one side!

As I walked out back through the field to my car, I recalled some of the many times my father said that he had enough trouble paying for his own home over the years to even think about restoring the old Kasey House. With no insulation and only a few small fireplaces in its two bedrooms and a small, coal-fueled Warm Morning stove in the parlor, it wasn’t a cozy, warm and toasty place to be, he recalled. As a teenager, you slept with as many blankets under you as you did over you because the draft beneath the straw mattresses was unmerciful. Blankets were like gold to farmers. His Uncle Lynn, Granddaddy Martin’s brother, once half-jokingly remarked that in his day a smart man looking for a wife would want to know how many quilts she had and if she knew how to make them at all (which my Aunt Beulah did)!
No, my father would say, the Kasey House would keep the rain and the leaves off of you, but little more. Furthermore, life was not a story book tale for my father when he had lived at the Dabney Place, or even here. For him, unlike me, there were no picture book images or views in his mind. He had worked hard here. He and my mother, in his words, had “made their stand” here. But for me, this place had been just a pretty place to look at.
Several months later, at a personal property auction, I sold that old red bike in the Kasey House. In hindsight, I almost regret it because my grandchildren could have had one more memento from their grandfather’s boyhood. But there’s barely enough room in my shed for their own bikes and toys, much less an old rusted one.
My view from the porch was beginning to change.
As I walked back to the house, I looked out into the backyard and saw Jackie Tuck, a friend and neighbor who first took care of the farm after my father died, and one of his sons, Tracy, in the pasture behind my father’s house. Father and son had borrowed my father’s tractor. Jackie was using the front-end loader to lift his son high up into the apple tree to get the fruit near the top before it all fell to the ground and rotted. I looked longingly at what they were doing. Then, I drove back to my own home, and life, in the suburbs.

LOVING YOUR NEIGHBOR


“Our prejudices are our mistresses; reason is at best our wife, very often heard indeed, but seldom minded.”
Lord Chesterton, Letter to His Son, April 13, 1752




“Today is May the 28th, 1998, and, it is Thursday. We are balin’ hay. We have hay rolled up and hay not yet cut. This has been the best hay year that we’ve ever had since we’ve been in this country. I talked to Jerry Meador yesterday and he said it was the best hay year that he had ever seen.
And while we we’re talkin’ about hay, I thought about Mamma tellin’ us that down yonder at the Tradin’Post (a nearby general store, a few miles from the house), there were two old black women and their brother that lived there, Dolly and Milly Hudson. Mamma said these women used to pull crab grass out of people’s corn fields and put it in bags to winter a cow. I thought today we could’ve easily carried them a roll if they were here now.
Now, these women, Dolly and Mille, they made baskets out of splits, and I used to go with Uncle Emmet Martin , that was Granddaddy Martin’s uncle and Grandpa Lee’s brother. He would go out in the woods and I would go with him and he would cut a little oak and make splits out of them. I’d go with him to carry them down there to them to make baskets. They were great at it, too. They would make you a bushel basket for a bushel of corn or a half a bushel basket for half a bushel of corn or a gallon and so forth down like that.”

The Audio Journal of Harold Martin


A slave is buried on the Kasey Seats Farm, and his grave site, I am told, is in the cow pasture somewhere along the Rock Castle Creek. Supposedly, the man escaped from a nearby farm, was chased into the pasture, shot, and buried unceremoniously where he fell. My father often wondered about the man who tried to free himself from his captivity and who had not been fortunate enough to escape his captors.

I do not recall knowing one black farmer during my childhood. At that time, African-Americans in our community had not progressed far past the level of Dolly and Millie Hudson. Of course, I knew more than one individual who worked for white farmers. Both my grandfather and my father hired young men from the community of African-Americans that still thrives along a portion of Hendricks’ Store Road, near the first Shoprite grocery, to get up hay each summer.
Ingrained in my mind from my earliest recollection was my fathers’ steadfast belief that “blacks have been mistreated in this country.” I have heard him say, while recollecting on the civil rights movements of the 1960s, that had he been born black, he would have gladly marched right alongside the other protesters. My father worked with my grandfather on a construction site in Danville when a group of high school students marching to the Municipal building were turned back by fire hoses and he recalled how shoes and clothes had been torn from their owner’s feet as they were driven back behind police lines.
My father, of course, had also seen instances of prejudice practiced against blacks closer to home. Once, at a Moneta business during the early 1940s, he witnessed a “colored” man whom he knew who was refused service because of the color of his skin. “They oughta had a sign in there that says ‘no niggers allowed in here’,” the embarrassed man said loudly as he walked back outside the establishment after being refused the purchase of several sandwiches. His remarks, my father reasoned, were not confrontational, but to salvage some measure of self-respect following his humiliation. Dejected and with his pride wounded, the man slighted himself to make his audience laugh and his humiliation easier to bear. If the crowd laughed with him, not at him, he could, perhaps, preserve at least a shred of his dignity.
“Now they could’ve taken that man’s money but they were too ignorant,” concluded my father.

Although I never asked him, I wonder if my father had ever felt guilty for not speaking up for his acquaintance, or even offering to go back inside the business and make a purchase for him. Probably, he did. Maybe fear of his own humiliation prevented it. Perhaps, being a young man, he was not offended over an incident that was, for the time, commonplace. But, as the years went by, he no doubt reflected often on the event and regretted that it happened. Though he was not and could not have been completely free from prejudice (he had used the “n” word and so had I), he knew it was ugly and wrong and he taught me that God made us all and loves us all the same.
My father must have thought about that missed opportunity often while watching the turbulent Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s unfold on the evening TV news. But overcoming prejudice entirely is not always easy to do. My parents enrolled me in a private school, Otterburn Academy, established in 1967 and located on Route 122, from grades 1-11 as a result of the white migration out of the nations’ public schools. Whether right or wrong, they did what they thought was best for me. My father would have gladly used his tractor to take hay, without charge, to Dolly and Milly Hudson. In our butcher shop, my parents would often give a discount to or include a free gift of meat to the poorer people in the community, who, regardless of their skin color, would come in shopping for the cheaper, end cuts of beef and pork. For them, it was just the right thing to do. A man with a tractor, able to help a neighbor, any neighbor, who was less fortunate, was, both to my mother and father, an obligation. As he looked back on other early events in his life, so, too, was helping a black man to make a simple purchase in a country store. He didn’t do that, but he shared the experience with me many times over the years and, in doing so, he taught me not to reject people because of the color of their skin. As Lord Chesterton would agree, it is best to mind the wife.

A KINDRED SPIRIT

“Have we not all one father? Hath not one God created us?”

Bible, Malachi 2:10


On a picture-postcard Sunday afternoon in October 2001, I stood on the fishing pier of Smith Mountain Lake State Park in Huddleston with a visitor from Uganda. The recent horror of September 11, 2001 seemed many worlds away from this quiet paradise. I looked at my new friend, who lived in a world that is many worlds different from mine, and pined that my father could not be here, too, to meet a man whose life would have undoubtedly fascinated him.
Wilson Okaka had just commented that Appalachian Power’s engineering feat was “a creative use of natural resources.” “Nature has blessed this place,” he said with a sigh, as we looked out over the vast expanse of water before us. Suddenly, this reverie was broken when his eyes caught what was, for him, a strange sight back on shore.
“Those fishermen are throwing their catch back into the water!” he cried in astonishment. “Back home, this is unprecedented. There would be a great tug-of-war if you tried to get a Ugandan to throw his fish back into the water.”
“These fellows were probably participating in a tournament,” I reasoned aloud. “We have lots of them here.”
“In Uganda,” Wilson, retorted, “men do not normally fish for sport.”

My guest’s visit to America was sponsored by the International Association of Audio Information Services, a membership organization of reading services providing the printed word to print-impaired individuals. Our course, developed in cooperation with the United States Telecommunications Training Institute, an organization offering tuition-free technical and management training in telecommunications and broadcasting to qualified participants from countries throughout the developing world, was How to Develop an Audio Information Service.
Wilson, who was 43 at the time of his visit, was president of the Northern Uganda Press Association. He was also a lecturer on Environmental Communications at Kyambogo University in Kampala. He has served as Assistant Secretary in the Ministries of Information, Labour, Energy and Culture and Community Development. His curriculum vitae lists 22 papers at various conferences and seminars throughout Africa and abroad.
Now, Wilson Okaka had traveled to Roanoke, Virginia from Africa to learn what I could teach him about radio broadcasting. I was in awe of this man, though. How can I justify his long trip to America after I have taught him all I know? Will it be enough? How can I ensure that he will have a truly worthwhile experience in this country?
On the shores of beautiful Smith Mountain Lake in Bedford County, I breathed a sigh of relief as Wilson viewed the spectacle back on shore. It would be just as important for him to see America and how Americans live as it would be for him to see WVTF’s transmitter atop Poor Mountain. Indeed, we would learn much from each other, and we did.
Wilson loved what he saw during his seven days in Virginia. Along with Smith Mountain Lake in Bedford County, he ate in a fast-food restaurant for the first time (King Burger, he called it), stared in amazement at the size of the Walmart Supercenter at Valley View in Roanoke, and visited my family farm. Proudly, I showed him a horse-drawn plow my father used as a boy, thinking he would be impressed by this piece of Bedford County agricultural memorabilia. I was humbled, though, when he said that he had seen many of them. Ugandans, he said matter-of-factly as he munched on an apple he had picked from a nearby tree, still use them.

Wilson did not come to Roanoke for a tour, though. He came to the United States on a mission. Ten percent of his fellow countrymen have vision problems which are due, in no small part, to inadequate health care. The rate of illiteracy in his homeland is absurdly high. Many people who can read are unable to afford to buy newspapers and magazines. At the time of this writing, the wage of the average Ugandan was 40,000 shillings a month. 2000 Ugandan shillings equal one American dollar.
The average Ugandan has no experience with cable television, DVD players or iPods. The average Ugandan does not even own a radio. As early as five years ago, there was only one government-operated station in the whole country. Now that the industry has been privatized, there are now about 70 stations, and Wilson sees in them an opportunity to bring the printed word to the vision-impaired and the illiterate.
Wilson took home a model of how we meet the needs of Americans who can no longer read standard newsprint. He was impressed by both the model and the cadre of volunteers we depend on to make it a success. He asked many questions. He read scores of newspapers, magazines, brochures and training materials I gave him. Then, he asked more questions.
“I am thankful to be here,” Wilson said to everyone he met.
I, on the other hand, was thankful to hear him express this sentiment. Though a great gulf separates our lifestyles, he was not critical of ours but, instead, applauded it. Less than a month after the horrific terrorist attacks on our soil, it was refreshing to hear someone from a developing country praise the United States and its way of life.
“If I were banished to a desert island,” Wilson said at our dinner table on his last night in America, I would only ask for two things: a radio, and a Bible.” A Bible in Uganda is both rare and expensive. In August, Wilson allowed himself an extravagance, and he purchased a new King James version at a cost of 20,000 Ugandan shillings. He plans on keeping it at his office.
“This way,” he explained, “if something happens to my old one,” I’ll have a bit of security.”

I knew my father well enough to know that had he been living to hear Wilsons’ remark, he would have given Wilson the keepsake Bible that belonged to one of his friends who had lived and worked on the farm where he had been raised. He never would have forgotten a story of such simple faith, and he would have told it often to others.
I had been feeling very insecure for the past few weeks. I looked at Wilson, a man who had no qualms about boarding an airliner and traveling 20 hours from home to a nation still reeling from one of the worst tragedies in its history. Wilson’s visit made me feel secure, and it gave me courage, too. How refreshing it was to remember that we are a very prosperous nation, and Wilson helped me to see just how much for which we have to be thankful .
“We have been very refreshed by what we have seen here today,” said Wilson when we left the dock at the State Park and headed back to the car. I looked at him and realized just how much this visit to America would mean to this man; it would be the trip of a lifetime.
Yes, Wilson, I thought, we have.

A COUNTRY CHRISTMAS

“If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work.”

Shakespeare, I Henry IV



“It is Christmas here, December 23, 1998. It is Wednesday. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. It’ll be sleetin’ and everything this evenin’. I thought I’d tell you this last one I thought of the other day, since it is Christmas.
I remember we moved down here in December of 1932. They were gettin’ a Christmas program together over here at Ayer’s School and they got me in it. I was a brownie, and Mommy Kate made me a brownie suit. It’s around here because I saw it here some months ago. But anyhow, we were out on the stage. When they pulled the curtains, Jack said, “Mamma, there’s Harold!” Well, that locked me up. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I was sittin’ next to Roger Ferguson. He was in it and he knew my lines and he said them over to me a time or two and, finally, I got it over.”

The Audio Journal of Harold Martin



I have two Christmas traditions: I finish my Christmas gift shopping by Thanksgiving, and I do all that I can on the Internet. I despise crowded shopping malls, driving to work before 8:00am and seeing mall lots already crowded, and, worst of all, over-priced retail goods that can be purchased for less on-line. With my method, I don’t fight traffic, stand in lines or walk from store to store to find what I want. From the comfort of my chair, through a broad band connection, I screen shop, and transact commerce in nanoseconds. The computer has taken the anxiety out of Christmas shopping.
Isn’t it ironic that Christmas can be a time of anxiety?
In the thirty-seven years that I knew my father, he never worried over a single Christmas present. The reason is he never shopped. One season, when I was about 12 years old and watching my mother wrap some presents, my exasperated mother, who took care of all the household matters, including the holiday shopping, jokingly remarked to me, “If something ever happens to me, honey, you’d never get a thing for Christmas!”
From that moment, I began to hope that my mother would live a very long life!
My father hardly ever left the farm, if he could help it. Besides, he grew up in a time when a respectable man did not Christmas shop. That was for sisters, aunts, mothers-in-law and grandmothers. Simply, women shopped, men did not. So the holiday burden fell to my mother. My father’s only contribution to the season’s festivities was the sharing of some of his childhood memories.
First, he would tell us about how some 1930s’farm families in Moneta did their Christmas shopping. A trip to Bedford in those days was rare, and a trip to Roanoke was a special occasion. Turner’s Store in Huddleston, about 3 miles from where I grew up, was not just a gathering place for the community, it was the place where you brought what you needed, if, my father added, you bought anything at all. Here, you purchased the staples, like sugar, flour, and lamp oil; you made everything else on the farm. You bagged your own Thanksgiving turkey or butchered your own

Christmas ham; there was no frozen food section at the general store.
Turner’s Store was the only place around that carried the fresh oranges you received only once a year, that handful of hard candy in an old sock that served as your stocking, those cap pistols and other little toys you got in an old shoe box (I was fortunate enough to go there often in the 1970s when it was Nick Dellis’ store). One year, though, Daddy struck pay dirt. After my Grandaddy Martin started working at the American Viscose in Roanoke and began to make good money, he got a wind-up 1930's toy Model Ford from a big city store.
Next, my father would tell the family “The Brownie Story” (above) from 1932, the time he was a in a Christmas play at Ayer’s School. Then, after the unwrapping frenzy was past, my father did something that the family found amusing. After unwrapping his presents and telling us that we had spent too much money on him, he would very carefully pick up all of his gifts from under the tree, and he would take them to his bedroom and put them on top of his dresser. There, they would remain, untouched, for several months. Sometimes, though, it would be almost a full year before he would unwrap a new shirt or put on a new pair of shoes. He just liked to save things and keep them new for as long as he could. That was a habit born in the Depression era when you did not get nice things too often.
My father died in August 1999, and, a few weeks before Christmas, I cleaned out his room. There, I found last years’ Christmas gifts. In a drawer, I found his new blue flannel shirt, still unopened. On top of the dresser was the Jeff Gordon racing wallet he would have used, maybe, in a few years, and in his closet were his new hiking boots. I gave the wallet to another Gordon fan, but I kept the shoes and shirt for myself.

My wife says I’m a lot like my father when it comes to Christmas, and I can’t argue the point. I don’t set things back like he did, but, as my grandchildren grow up, they’ll know all about Turner’s Store and the way things used to be before the holiday madness set in. They’ll know that those unopened gifts were enjoyed because, even though they were unused, they were, at least, there, and very much appreciated.. Despite the passing of the years, my father could not rid himself of the habit of setting things back, unused, a habit instilled in him by parents who had experienced many of life’s material uncertainties. Finally, they’ll also hear about that nervous little brownie, and maybe they will learn something from it, too.
I know I did.

A Crack of the Whip

CHAPTER 7

A CRACK OF THE WHIP

“In love of home, the love of country has its rise.”
Charles Dickens

“Mother also told another tale. They moved from below the [Smith] mountain December 10th, 1910. She was 12 years old and she said about a year later, or somethin’ like that, Mr. and Mrs. Graves bought that farm down there where CP Graves lives now, where the store is. She said that she and Mrs. Graves, she was about 13, I reckon, went back over through the mountain to visit people that they had left when they moved up here. Momma said that Mrs. Graves drove a horse and buggy and her daddy told Ms. Graves to be careful because this horse would lay down in water. So, when they got to the river, I asked Momma what did Ms. Graves do to make him go through there. She said, ‘She put the whip to him.’ And also Mother said that she held Mrs. Graves’ baby, her first one, and oldest one. She held it all the way and Ms. Graves drove the buggy. And they stayed over there a week or 10 days. Anyhow, it was a long visit and Mother said that she wore her mother’s ring. Her mother let her wear it on the trip and she lost it somewhere. She said that almost ruined the trip for her.”

The Audio Journal of Harold Martin


My Grandma Martin was born in 1898. She would be in her early thirties before she rode an automobile. In her lifetime, the radio and television were invented. She watched the 1968 moon landing on TV and lived to learn about the computer age. Indeed, that ninety-four year span of history was eventful.
During her later years, she and my father would often make the same trip “back over through the mountain” by car that she and her friend had made so long ago by buggy. Always, she would first compare then marvel at the difference in travel time between the two modes of transportation. In her youth, she, like my father, rarely envisioned a future living in the country without horses to pull wagons.
At a critical juncture in the trip my father relates, the two ladies were faced with what would be a dilemma for a people unaccustomed to using horses for beasts of burden. Strike a horse with a whip? Do they put the whip to the animal and keep going, get off and try to coax it along, or just wait for the doggone thing to make up it’s on mind? For these hardened country women of a long-gone era, there was no question what had to be done.
Sometimes, to put our own selves into action, we have to crack a whip, too.
When I think of my grandmother’s trip back to her ancestral home, I see that “home” is where your family lives.
Once, it was hard for my wife to get me in the mood to travel. Until 1996, I had no desire to travel by airplane; flying was my greatest fear. Another fear was that I would live my whole life and never confront this fear. I spent a lot of time dreaming of far-off places from my hideaway at the Kasey House but was I doomed to be grounded forever? My job at WVTF Public Radio, though, was to provide an opportunity for me to do battle with a very big obstacle.

My first flight was to a convention of radio reading services in Memphis, Tennessee in June 1996. As the plane made its ascent from the Roanoke Regional Airport, my arms were frozen on the arm rests. I tried to raise them but they seemed glued down by fear. Although I managed to calm down enough to keep my fears between my wife and me and did not panic, I did consider renting an automobile once we landed in Charlotte, North Carolina to make our connection and then to continue the journey by land. Kathy, though, would not even consider the idea. I had to get on the plane, she said.
The second leg of the journey was much easier for me, and I was near ecstasy when those wheels touched down at Memphis International Airport. Now, I thought, I have finally won the battle. However, some fears are not that easy to overcome; I still had to get back home.
On Sunday morning, we boarded a flight that would take us first to Charlotte, then to Roanoke. I started getting nervous as soon as I woke up. I recalled our trip to Graceland and being on Elvis Presley’s jet, the Lisa Marie. The plane had a full-size bed in the rear. Who could ever get that relaxed on a plane that they could sleep? I asked myself. Perhaps we could drive home? I asked Kathy. She didn’t even answer me this time. She was laying the whip to her mule to get him to move. I thought of my mother persuading my reluctant father to undertake a risky business venture when he was fifty years old as I made my way on to the plane. This is something I had to do. But it would be far from easy.
I could even raise my arms as the plane made its ascent as it left Memphis, but I stayed in a state of near- panic for two hours. I took out a composition book and pen and wrote over and over “I will not be afraid,” until I could write no more. My wife worked on needlepoint and remained silent. As soon as the plane came to a complete stop on the tarmac at Roanoke Regional Airport, I vowed never to fly again.

If you have ever glanced out an airplane window just to make sure the propellers are turning properly or if you have listened in nervous anticipation for a jet’s landing gear to open as it prepares to descend, then you have experienced the almost-crippling fear some people have about flying. But I would soon be a board member of an international organization of reading services. In a few years, I would become it’s president. The responsibility required attendance at a yearly convention and a fall board meeting, so I would have to face my fear. I had given my word to my colleagues. The hardest part would be keeping my word to myself that I would overcome this fear.
But, what would I do? The doctor! I decided. Yes, I’ll go to the doctor!
In my pocket, on a key chain, I now carry a tiny pill bottle that contains several Ativan tablets, an anti-anxiety agent. Years later, I still do not fly without it. I keep it nearby if anxiety strikes, which, occasionally, it does, and I take it only when needed. The good news is that my level of anxiety has decreased over the years, even after September 11. Even better news is that I have had the opportunity to travel to many nice places throughout the United States and Canada. The more I fly, the better I am able to control my fear.
Slowly, I have grown to love to travel. When Kathy and I were in Phoenix at a conference, I was content to stay at the hotel while she made a trip to the Grand Canyon. Never have I ever been so glad that my wife threw a fit that day. Of course, I went. When we embarked from our tour bus, she reached for my hand and said, “This is something we’ve got to do together.” As we made our way up a hill, and looked over the 15-mile expanse in front of us, we both gasped at the same moment. It is a moment that I will always treasure. Here, I thought, is one of those places that I dreamed of while standing on the porch of the Kasey House.

I have heard it said that the more you travel, the more you appreciate home. Many people who have moved to Southwest Virginia to reside on Smith Mountain Lake say life could not be any better than it is here. One thing that attracts many residents to this area is the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains. I understand their sentiments; I never thought I would ever see a more beautiful sight than the pastoral view from that porch back home, but I have. The beautiful red rocks of Sedona, Arizona; the breath-taking view from the Grand Canyon; the majestic falls at Niagara; the seashore at Mission Beach, California. There are more beautiful places of which I used to dream from my porch, and I want to see them all!
I do not owe my good fortune solely to medication. I credit my desire to the one I used to have when I stood out on that Kasey House porch, in the silence, when I wondered about the places that were just beyond the horizon. However, a wonderful traveling companion, who did not mind cracking her whip, compelled me to pull myself out of the shallow water and to continue my journey to the other side of the shore.
I am not convinced that traveling has made me appreciate my boyhood home anymore than I already did. I have discovered, though, that Home can be anywhere. Home is not just land and a house. Home is memories of those whom you loved who have passed on. Home, too, is where your heart is at. Home is not just the past, but the present. Home is wherever the people you love and who are willing to crack the whip are at.

CHAPTER 8
GOOD EATS

“The belly is ungrateful - it always forgets we already gave it something.”
Russian Proverb

“And then the one about Benny being born: Rose and I started out that mornin’’ on an old ‘54 Chevrolet I had bought from Bob Harris and she was drivin. But we made it to the hospital and she was all day havin’ Benny. Long before night, she got in to the depth of her labor and she called the nurses in there and told them she wanted her doctor to come in. She had paid him all along and he had promised her that this wouldn’t be any trouble at all and she wanted to see him. Well, the nurse said, “Honey, there is nothin’ he can do. All of us have had our children this way. Nothin’ can be done.” And Rose said, ‘Well, I don’t reckon it really matters, I’m dyin’ anyhow!’ And my father used to love to have me tell that!”

The Audio Journal of Harold Martin

July 24 is my birthday, and for as long as I can remember, my father told my birth story on that day. He also told a version of his own birth, too:

On November 25, 1925, Dr. Sam Rucker, Sr. drove a buggy from his home in Moneta to the home of Carleton and Fawnie Martin in Huddleston. On the way to deliver my father, he made two stops, one to pick up Jirdie Martin, the other for Sally Huffman, the newborn’s future grandmothers. My father was brought into the world with little difficulty, and after the birth, the grandmothers fixed the doctor a meal of fried eggs, ham, apples and biscuits. Daddy never forgot this, because, as he often told me, his parents were young and didn’t “have two nickels to rub together,” but they did have good food to eat.
A chronic dieter in her early sixties once told me that she was going to try a “modified” South Beach diet. This person had examined Atkins and other popular diet plans and found this new version of an old version to be the key to a thinner waistline. Strange, I thought. Why not just count calories? Besides, time passes, we age and get thicker in the process. We just cannot fight time.
Truly, one of the pleasures of getting older is when you realize that you are not supposed to look in your forties, fifties or sixties the way you did in your twenties.
Once, while driving down a Roanoke City street, I passed a small sign on a light pole that read, “I lost 40 pounds in two months.” A phone number was also included with this dubious declaration. My first thought was directed at it’s writer: “You lost 40 pounds in two months? Have you been ill?” My second and final frightening realization was someone overly concerned with a few unwanted pounds will be calling that number.
We exercise more than ever, but we get bigger. The folly of dieting is the more we try, the more we fail. We exercise, and the effort makes us hungry. We exercise and then feel like we deserve a reward for the effort and indulge in a treat. Exercise builds muscle, which weighs more than fat, so we gain weight. We eat low-fat, light or otherwise low-calorie foods to keep off the pounds but still have cravings for a candy bar. Subsequently we inhale 400 calories of bland low-fat cookies when one 270-calorie candy bar would have satisfied our urge.
The hungry people of the world must be laughing at us. In Wilson Ukakas’ Uganda, men not fishing for sport do not care if their catch is prepared in the frying pan or on the broiler.

Ironically, food is the Enemy Number 1 of Americans who can afford to buy groceries. We try to avoid food. We say that a doughnut is “bad” for us. But, there was a time when farm folks felt very lucky to have food, and they spent most of their time just trying to get enough of it.
“Harold, you’re just tryin’ to set some money aside for a rainy day,” Ed Blankenship, an older, neighboring farmer, commented to my young struggling father many years ago. “But in my day, “ he said, “we were just tryin’ to find enough to eat!”
Some people had a rough time of it, too. November brought with it what farmers called “hog killin’ weather,”that time when it was cold enough to butcher hogs for the winter meat. Some families would need to sell the hams, the prime cuts, to neighbors or general stores so they would have a little extra spending money. My father said they were fortunate because they never had to do that. Granddaddy Martin had a good job in Roanoke at the American Viscose and a farm in Moneta, too. The family raised the meat and vegetables they ate. They had their own eggs and butter and made bread at home. For many families, money from a small tobacco crop was the only money they ever had, and it only came once a year.
In my father’s diary dated November 11, 1986, the entry reads:

“Today is my 61st birthday. Went over to mother’s this morning and she told the birth story again. The doctor picked up Momma Jirdie and she came down with him. Ma Jirdie and Mommie Kate had ham and eggs for the doctor’s breakfast. My dad had good eats in his house at 23 years of age!”

Ham and eggs aren’t considered “good eats” anymore, though. They are laden with fat, loaded with cholesterol, and are artery-cloggers. They will kill us, we are told. But, not having them could kill us, too.

My father would say jokingly that he was in his thirties before he ever heard the word “calorie.” Exercise was not a choice for his parents or for him. Farmers had no choice but to work to be able to eat. I have heard my Grandma Martin remark of a young lady “Why, look at her! She’s so pretty and fat!” But her observation was not an insult; she meant that the young lady had enough to eat.
Most Americans have enough to eat now. Oddly, though, the tables have turned; wealthy people tend to be thinner, while poorer people tend to be heavier. There is a danger in not having enough to ea but, ironically, there is a danger in having more than enough to eat. That is a concept that one young farm couple, on a cold winter night in 1925 with a newborn son, would have never been able to grasp.
Anyone who tries to lose 40 pounds in two months won’t be able to grasp it, either.

The Forewarned Man

CHAPTER 9

THE FOREWARNED MAN

“For all your days prepare,
And meet them all alike,
When you are the anvil, bear,
When you are the hammer, strike.”

Edwin Markham, “Preparedness,” 1918

“I was just thinkin’ the other day about the snow we had in 19 and 58. Ma and the rest of the family had just moved over here to the Kasey Place from the Dabney Place. It came a snow up to the windows and it was down below zero and me and Ma had all the cows to milk. Mr. Corbin, he lived down behind the dumpster down on the river, and was walkin’ to the mailbox for some reason or the other in that deep snow and he died from a heart attack. It took days before they could get him over to Updike’s [Funeral Home]. Leonard Bays bulldozed over that way and they finally got him there. I went to this funeral after the snow started meltin’ down at Staunton [Church].
Daddy and me went to Bedford before the storm and he bought a bunch of coal and a new stove, a Warm Morning. If it hadn’t been for that, I guess we would’ve frozen to death, but we made out pretty good with that coal and stove.”

The Audio Journal of Harold Martin


The President’s Day Storm of 2003 was expected to be fierce, so I began making preparations a days ahead of its commencement. I weighted down the back of my pickup with patio block that I would use later that summer for landscaping; I went to the grocery store to stock up the pantry with a few items we really did need, but also to purchase that gallon of milk and loaf of bread without which the rest of the food in the house would be useless; I made sure that my grandmother, who lived by herself at the time on the family farm, was well-stocked with her necessities, too.
Over the years, having used my father’s story as my inspiration, I have learned not to wait until the last minute to buy what is needed to weather a storm, natural or otherwise. By nature, country people plan for contingencies, and, when snow is in the forecast, they have already been prepared for days. This behavior is ingrained in us from earlier generations when people prepared for the barrenness of winter during the summertime with gardens and canning produce. In the Fall, hogs and cattle would be slaughtered for meat to eat during the winter months. However, even the most fastidious planner and worrier (as was my father) can be caught with his bib overalls down.
I wish that I had thought to ask my father why my Granddaddy Martin waited until the last minute to buy a stove to heat the Kasey House. He was a seasoned, old farmer who did everything with time to spare. He was a man who left few things to chance and who was always on time for appointments. Once, he and my Uncle Jack (my father’s youngest brother) had an appointment to meet several local farmers about a cattle purchase at 1:00 in the afternoon. Though the sellers lived just a few miles away, Granddaddy showed up at Uncle Jack’s house at 10:30 in the morning.

Furthermore, my father used to tell me that the only good thing about the Kasey House was that it kept the rain and leaves off of you. Because it had no modern-day insulation, it wasn’t much better than a freezer during the winter months. You had to have as many quilts under you as you had covering you to keep warm; if you did not, then the air under the bed would chill your backside. Sometimes, even the “honeypots,” (this house had no bathrooms) would freeze, too. Though the house had fireplaces, they helped very little because they were small and did not hold much wood. My father said it was almost necessary to crawl up inside one feel any heat, most of which escaped up and out of the chimney, anyway. So, why would a wizened old farmer like Granddaddy Martin wait so long to buy a coal stove?
Perhaps the most ironic part of this affair is that Granddaddy Martin was a progressive man among his peers. He drove from Moneta to Roanoke every day for years to work at the American Viscose instead of trying to eke out a living on the farm by growing tobacco. He drove a new pickup, too. As a farmer, he tried out all the latest farming equipment and techniques. His family had one of the first radios, refrigerators and television sets in the community. So, why was a stove so far down on his list of priorities?
When the American Viscose closed in the 1950's, when Granddaddy was in his mid-fifties, he managed to make a good living buying and selling horses, cattle, saddles. He was successful, too; he managed to pay for a beautiful, new brick ranch he had built on White House Road in the early 1950s. He was the model for a can-do type of man, but he almost got caught in a pretty bad storm. Almost, that is.
My grandfather waited until the last minute to prepare for a winter blast, but he was lucky. I, too, get caught in some bad storms, and they’re not all weather-related. No one can prepare for every contingency, and Granddaddy learned that same lesson, too. When he and my grandmother moved into their new well-insulated brick ranch house, they had a home with a wood cook stove in the basement and a very modern electric oil furnace, too. You don’t fool a wizened old farmer twice, particularly when he almost learned his lesson the cold way.

Next, If You're Sick!

CHAPTER 10

“NEXT...IF YOU’RE SICK!”

“The physician must have at his command a certain ready wit, as dourness is repulsive both to the healthy and the sick.”

Hippocrates, Decorum (c. 400 B.C.)

“Dear old Dr. Sam! - there will never be another one. I visited him in the nursing home and he had changed so much, I walked right by him and didn’t recognize him, I took fruit and fed him a banana and he ate like he was starved. H e couldn’t speak, but I told him that he used to say that he was the best doctor in Moneta (of course, he was the only one) and that I agreed with that, and he smiled. My husband used to ride around with him on Sunday afternoons to make his house and hospital calls.
I called him once for my husband about eleven o’clock one winter night. He said he had kidney colic and couldn’t come, but to get him to Bedford Hospital. We lived about a quarter mile ofF Rt. 122 and the snow had drifted in over the road and it was waist deep. I told Dr. Sam that he couldn’t get to our house anyway, so my son took my husband on the tractor out through the field and up to where the car was parked near Rt. 122, and they went to the hospital. About an hour later, Dr. Sam knocked at my door and he had waded that waist-deep snow and was out of breath and in pain, and he left actually groaning with pain. My husband had a history of ulcers and Dr. Sam said he was afraid one would bleed and he couldn’t get to the hospital. His father, the old Dr. Sam, died with a bleeding ulcer. I do not remember his father. We won’t forget Dr. Sam.

Sam was in Camelot in Salem. That’s where the VA put them-I believe it’s Salem Health Care now. I recall him saying when he was growing up, that times were so hard he went barefoot through the snow to feed the stock.
My husband was in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer and Jackie Thompson was there for the same thing. Dr. Sam told them absolutely no cigarettes or coffee and he gave orders at the cafeteria that no coffee was to be served to them. But they would sneak down to the break room and smoke and drink coffee. One Sunday morning when they were not expecting him, he walked in on them. He got so mad he said, ‘You all are not trying to get well!’ and stormed out. They were pretty shook up, but deserved what they got.
He had made several trips to see my father-in-law, and when they asked him how much they owed he gave a sum which was maybe a dollar a trip or less, and they said, “That’s not enough, you can’t do it for that amount.” He said, “I know what I’m doing. Mind your own business.”
I think the best story I know is about the bird dog. You may have heard it. He bought a dog, supposedly a bird dog, highly recommended by the owner. Dr. Sam said it was the sorriest dog he ever saw-couldn’t care less about birds! Sometime afterwards the man came to him with diarrhea and he told him he would fix him up with some medication. About a week later he came back very pale and weak and said he was worse, and said, “Are you sure you gave me what you aimed to give me?” Dr. Same said, “Yes, I’m sure I gave you exactly what I intended. Are you sure that was a bird dog you sold me?” He said the man never cam back.
I’m sure you recall that after he retired he doctored from the drug store for several years. He wasn’t one to give up. They gave him some kind of an award and it was presented at Bethlehem Church on Sunday morning and he sent his sister to accept it for him. He was seeing patients.”


Excerpts from a letter to the author by a former patient of Dr. Sam Rucker

“Why in the hell didn’t you call me sooner?” the cantankerous doctor bellowed into the telephone before slamming down the receiver.
Both bewildered and with tears in her eyes, my mother put her receiver down, too, yet more gently. One Saturday night, in the early 1970's, I developed a fever, and although I do not recall the particulars of my illness, I do recall my parent’s unease over calling Dr. Sam Rucker, an overworked, sometimes ill-tempered, but always badgered country doctor. Dr. Sam was known as much for his bouts of irritability as he was for his generosity, and, of course, my parents found the man in an ideal state of annoyance that evening. But my mother, who had a temperament similar to the doctor’s, decided to bite the bullet and make the call. She soon found, though, that she was no match for the tempest known as Sam.
My father stood nearby and watched. Probably thinking that the doctor might not be so harsh with a mother calling at an odd hour with a sick child, he had, by default, sacrificed my dear mother to Sam. He had witnessed Dr. Sam’s wrath enough to know what would happen. Perhaps when he suggested that my mother call Sam, he was thinking about the morning when, while waiting in the parking lot of the doctor’s old, Victorian-era home, he saw two sisters headed toward the one-room building that served as Dr. Sam’s office. One of the poor ladies was supported at the elbow by her sibling, and she was weeping silently, but not from pain. Daddy, who was talking to a neighbor while waiting for his own turn, noticed the two women’s misery and asked the weeping sister how she had been getting along. Through her sobs, she replied that Dr. Sam had admonished her on a prior visit to lose some weight. She had failed and she knew she was facing a tongue-lashing. She got one, too.

“I knew this would happen! I knew it!” my mother said, getting frustrated now. I’m now about the same age she was when she made this call, and I can imagine her saying to herself that if only I had been sicker, sooner, during Sam’s business hours, all would now be right with the world. But children can have bad timing, and it was now around 9:00pm. She had summoned the doctor from his comfortable chair and his respite from a busy week of caring for the health of a farming community. But she, like my father, knew what would soon happen.
My parents knew that after Sam had released some steam from his pressure-cooker temper, he would call back, and he did. He apologized to my mother, and she accepted the peace offering as if it was a three-carat diamond wrapped in a hundred dollar bill. Sam asked her a few basic questions, then told her to tell my father to come to his home in Moneta for some medicine.
For 37 years, Sam Rucker practiced medicine from a small frame wooden building and later from the large, Victorian-style main house that had been his home since 1912. Among the twelve Rucker siblings, there were two physicians, an RN, a pharmacist and a dentist. According to the Bedford Bulletin, Sam began his career in Elk View, West Virginia, and had the misfortune of having the same last name as a local family of hooligans. Once, on a house call to care for a sick child, the mother, who met the doctor at the door, was hesitant to let him in, for fear that her child would be afraid of a man whose last name was “Rucker,” so, the desperate but enterprising mother suggested he go by “Dr. Sam.”
The practice of medicine in a farming community did not make Dr. Sam a wealthy man. He was said to have purchased medicines at cost so that he could give them to patients who would, otherwise, be unable to afford them. As a recompense for his generosity, the Moneta Ruritan Club provided him with a car so that he could make his daily rounds after seeing patients at his home office each morning.

Patients, of course, contributed to Dr Sams’ temperament. Cars would fill his driveway early each morning, sometimes carrying patients whose condition did not warrant such an early visit. To one man who arrived at the doctor’s office at 6:00am one morning, Sam, who heard the car pulling up in the gravel driveway, raced outside as fast as a lighting bolt and yelled, “Don’t you have a bed to sleep in?”
In his final years, after he had discontinued his practice, Dr. Sam would set in the Moneta Pharmacy to pass the time and to talk with his former patients who came in to have prescriptions filled. By this time, in the late 1970's, Moneta had several doctors who practiced in a modern facility, but many old-timers still sought Dr. Sam. They would come into the pharmacy and describe their ailments to the nearly-blind old man, who would then instruct the pharmacist to take the patient’s blood pressure and temperature. If the sick person did not need to be sent next door to visit one of the other doctors, Dr. Sam would then have the pharmacist fill a prescription. On several occasions, I was one of his patients in the lobby of the Moneta Pharmacy, and I never received a bill.
I had the privilege, though, to visit the country doctor both in his small office and later in his home. I never witnessed the famous temper, but instead I encountered a stern but gentle man who seemed pleased to get a hug from a child. Sam’s departure coincided with the opening of the Village Family Physicians, and although I live in Roanoke, I travel to Moneta to see one of the doctors on staff there. Sam’s portrait hangs in the waiting room, and every time I pass it, I can still both see and hear him opening the door of his tiny office shouting, “Next, if you’re sick!”

Brotherly Love

CHAPTER 11

BROTHERLY LOVE

“One would be in less danger
From the wiles of the stranger
If one’s own kin and kith
Were more fun to be with.”
Ogden Nash



“February 15, 1980
Dear Sugar Boy,
How are you tonight? I hope you are doing just fine. Me and Sula (Grandma Martin’s sister, visiting) are just eating and sleeping. We have got a big snow, but Harold is taking good care of your calves. They sure have grown since you left.
You will have to get you a person to answer the phone when you get home. Everybody and his brother has called about you. Your girlfriend in Bedford called and talked a long time this morning and said she was coming to see you next week, and her mother called me, too. Lynn came over this morning and said if we needed anything to just let him know. He has been to see me several times.
I got my [Social Security] check . I put 180.00 in the bank.
We haven’t got the money to the man for the corn yet, but I will tell him what you said. He has been sick, Mrs. Moore said. Peggy and Annie carried my check to the bank for me. The rent man (a tenant who rented a house my uncle owned) was going to bring the money for the rent and I told him he couldn’t see you, so he said he would bring it over here in a day or two.

Harold killed three cows last night. Son, you do what they tell you and you will get well sooner. Don’t be uneasy about the calves. Harold is taking good care of them. You try and get well. I am feeling alright and you know all that wood I brought in I have got enough to last until the snow leaves. I will be up to see you in a few days soon as the roads get better.
By for now, Sweet Boy”
Letter from Grandma Martin to my Uncle Jack


Uncle Jack died five days after this letter was read to him by my father. When he finished, my father began to weep softly. My uncle was barely conscious and it was doubtful if he could comprehend what was being said to him. My father then reached down over the hospital bed and kissed his brother and ran his hand through his hair. The withered frame of his younger sibling haunted my father for years, and it would take several years before my father recovered from this loss.
When my Grandaddy Martin died in 1970, Uncle Jack moved in with Grandma Martin so that she wouldn’t need to live alone. Her house was a mile away from our home and was within sight of it. Every morning my father would get up before my mother and me and go to Grandma’s. She would already be up, fixing breakfast for the three of them in her basement kitchen (for reasons only she fully knew, my grandparents used this area as their primary living quarters, saving the upstairs for “company”). She cooked on her electric stove, but always, even in summer, had a small fire in the wood stove and kept water heated for coffee. Sometimes, if I got up early enough, I would go to eat, too.

Daddy, Uncle Jack and Grandma would eat, talk about what was going on in the community and watch some of the early morning news on television before the work day began. My Uncle Jack had a farm in Moneta, and made his living buying, raising and selling livestock. In addition to his cattle business, my father ran the slaughterhouse, and, sometimes, Grandma Martin, still spry at 82 years old, would come and help, too. Even during the time my father worked construction work, he was almost always at home every night, and he saw both his mother and brother every day.
Several months before Daddy took my grandmother’s letter to the hospital to read to Uncle Jack, I witnessed how much the brothers loved one another. After a day of work in the slaughterhouse, my father and I went to the hospital for a visit. He had not been able to visit him for the past week because November was always a busy month for butchering animals before winter, and Uncle Jack was scheduled to come home in a few days.
My Uncle’s skin was a pale yellow, the color of a days-old bruise as it begins to heal, and he had lost over twenty pounds since my father had last visited. When my father entered his room, he was stricken by his brother’s emaciated condition, and he went to him immediately, and kissed him without saying a word. It was apparent to him that my uncle’s cyrhossis would soon claim his life. On this night, my father finally realized that his brother would die, and the fact him hard. He cried all the way home, and cried most of the night, too.
After the two brothers exchanged pleasantries and spent a few moments talking about their cattle and how busy things were in the meat-packing plant, my father changed the conversation to a serious matter. He pulled out a Bible from the night stand drawer and began looking for a portion of scripture. Uncle Jack started to cry softly because he knew what my father was doing and he pulled the bed sheet up over his mouth so we would not see him cry.

Noticing this, my father, A Now wait, brother, don’t get upset.” “You and I haven’t done this before. It’ll be alright.” Then he bent over his bed and read a few passages of scripture, which I have now since forgotten, from the New Testament. After a few moments, my father asked him if he wanted to accept Christ, and Uncle Jack simply said “yes.”
When Uncle Jack said that, my father asked me to say a short prayer of thanksgiving. Then, the scene, which was a bit uncomfortable for a teenager, was over. Uncle Jack seemed relieved, too, but from that moment until the time he died, he seemed more peaceful. He had been humbled by what had happened, but the faith (Baptist) in which the brothers had been raised required this act of acceptance. Uncle Jack had been to church before, but he had never made the public commitment that Baptists believe is necessary for salvation. .
During the last several years of my father’s life, after my mother had passed away, my father and I spoke by phone at least once per day. He always ended our conversation by saying, “I love you more than yesterday, but less than tomorrow.” The physical expression of love that my father showed for his brother was always shown to me, and I have tried to show it in equal portions to my own family. Perhaps most farm men would have been uncomfortable embracing each other as did my father and uncle because “real men” are not supposed to do that kind of thing. But the two men I saw that night did not feel that way. Comfortable in their manhood, they knew that the true measure of a man had nothing to do with hiding emotions. On a much more accurate measurement stick, they were, after all, real men, indeed.

I Doze But Never Close

CHAPTER 12

I DOZE BUT NEVER CLOSE

“Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity.”
Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

Granddaddy Martin’s business slogan was “I Doze But Never Close,” and he advertised that message on a huge metal sign that hung in his front yard along Route 608 in Bedford County. He was a livestock trader who loved to wheel and deal. According to my father, Granddaddy was widely known in livestock circles throughout Southwestern Virginia. Once, I had the opportunity to test his claim. A listener had called my radio station on a business matter, and our conversation drifted to our origins and, oddly enough, to our respective grandfathers. The caller’s grandfather had also been a cattle dealer in the southern portion of the state, so, instinctively, I said that I was Pop Martin’s grandson, and then waited for his reaction. To my delight, the caller said that, of course, he had heard of Pop. He had even met him. His own grandfather, a fellow “penhooker” as they were sometimes called, had traded with Granddaddy. Both men, he said with a smile in his voice, had stolen from and lied to one another their whole lifetimes!

Beneath the catchphrase on Granddaddy’s sign were the words “Cattle Trader,” and though horses, cattle and saddles were his specialty, he would sell anything. Once, in a local country store, a customer admired his work boots and offered to buy them. Without hesitation, Granddaddy took them off, sold them on the spot, then drove home, unabashed, in his sock feet. At the American Viscose factory in Roanoke where he worked during the 1940's and 1950's as a shift laborer, he would sell produce and other wares from the back of his pickup as a carnival barker would entice passersby to come in for a show. He entertained his co-workers with typical shyster hard luck stories of having a sick wife and barefoot children, and his humor paid off well. If Granddaddy Martin were living today, he would have had a computer in his home. Furthermore, I am convinced that, like me, he would have been a fan of eBay. He was afraid neither of change nor new frontiers. My father said that he tried all of the new farming techniques for his time and owned one of the first pickups, refrigerators, radios and, later, TVs seen in Moneta. During a time when many farmers tried to eke out a living on small farms with tobacco allotments, he left the care of his farm to his own father and his sons while he commuted to Roanoke each day on twisted country roads to the American Viscose factory. Even during the Depression, his family was well-cared for. Each time I log onto to eBay, I think of him and realize that a part of him lives in me. I know that the digital age, particularly the virtual marketplace, would have fascinated him.
On my desk at work is a plastic bag full of small rocks that were supposedly extracted from a South American gem mine. Although I see distinct veins of a green substance that might, through the rock-tumbling process, yield a precious stone, I look occasionally at the small pile of earth and laugh because I paid twenty dollars for a bag of rocks. But, I know why I bought them. Even the best wheeler-dealer can be bamboozled by a good talk, or, in this case, a good, written description. We have all been taken by a fast, convincing talker, even Pop Martin. My paternal grandfather claims to have been the only man in the community that ever caught him off his guard.

One summer morning in the late 1950s, both of my grandfathers met each other while traveling on Route 64, now Tuck Road. Granddaddy Martin waved him over to discuss a cattle deal. He understood that my granddad had a few cattle to sell and he wanted to buy them “sight unseen.” He pulled some cash from his pocket, leaned his arm out of his truck and counted it out for my Granddad Arthur, who was in his truck, too. Doc Arthur knew the cattle were not worth what he was being offered, but Granddaddy Martin, assuming that this construction superintendent knew nothing about own cattle, was insistent. So, the transaction was completed, and each man went his own way.
Granddaddy Martin, anxious to see his bargain, then went down to my grandfather’s barn to inspect his purchase. Since he was alone, no one witnessed his first reaction to his blunder, but my father says that he saw him back at his own house about an hour later, laying down in the front yard, moaning. Doc Arthur proudly told that story for the rest of his life.
Granddaddy Martin died when I was six years old, but from what I have heard about him, I can realize that he understood how and why people buy things. Though he would have liked eBay because you could buy and sell merchandise for profit, eBay could not offer him the one element of the sale that he needed: people. He loved face-to-face interaction; it was his specialty, and he relished it. Granddaddy loved people and he loved life. My Uncle Willard once spoke to him of a future world population explosion to which he replied, “Well, as long as there’s standin’ room, I’ll be happy!” He loved to be the center of attention and people were drawn to him, and his personality required him to be with people. But, at the end of a day of salesmanship and showmanship, I can see him checking his very own auction page, just like I do. The one thing that he would have absolutely loved about eBay is that he could sell his merchandise, collect his money, and not even be present. He could doze, and never close.

Saturday Night Fights

CHAPTER 13

SATURDAY NIGHT FIGHTS

“How many times go we to comedies, to masques, to places of great and noble resort, nay even to church only to see the company?”
John Donne, Sermons, No. 16, 1622

“It happened long ago,in the thirties’ I reckon. I was eight or ten years old and Jack was, of course, four years younger than me. And up here at Henricks’ Store, right across from Shop-Rite, they had an ape show. A mister Noell passed through the country, and he had this ape in a cage and if you could hold him down for so long you would win something. But nobody could ever hold him down and Sandy Martin, that was Grandaddy Martins’ uncle, he decided he would handle him, and the lights went out a few minutes and when they did come back on, he was knocked out. Daddy said his wife, Oakie, had knocked him out with a stump! But, anyhow, after a while, one of the Spradlins, Haywood or one of his younger brothers decided that he would tackle the ape. He got in there and he put his finger under that piece he had in his mouth to keep him from bitin’ you and he bit Spardlin and everything went wild there. The lights went out and the people started stampedin’ out of there and Jack was just a little shaver and they run over him and Buford caught him by the jacket and held onto him until we could get out of there. Crantz was along, I think and Willard and me and Jack. Buford and Crantz said they saw Jess and Edna with a lantern headed down the road home, wide open. It was a great night!”

The Audio Journal of Harold Martin

Down at Turner’s General Store in Huddleston, farm boys and girls used to gather every Saturday night around a radio for a night’s entertainment. My father said that for a dime, you could buy a Pepsi-Cola and a big handful of peanuts, which Mr. Turner would measure out very carefully in an empty potted meat can. Then, you were ready for a big evening.
Joe Louis was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world in those days, and my father was one of many young people who gathered to hear his fights on the radio. The Brown Bomber captivated those youngsters because he, too, was young and tough, and he never lost a match. These were ideals a farm boy could admire.
Louis captivated some of the young men so much that they even staged their own bare-knuckles contests out in the storage building where Mr. Turner kept the livestock feed. Uncle Bud Martin usually won because he was by nature a real tough fellow. Uncle Willard, on the other hand, usually ended up with a nosebleed after the slightest tap. My father, undoubtedly the smartest in the bunch, recognized early on that some boys belonged in the ring, while others, like him, belonged in the stands.
The general store was at the heart of the community. Patrons bought goods, heard gossip, renewed acquaintances and listened to the radio For a while, those young men at Turner’s Store, like so many other youngsters living in the country in those times, were transported by their mind’s eye to Madison Square Garden to become part of a New York City crowd. As they heard the voice of the announcer, the roar of the crowd, and the play-by-play of the commentator, some of them, surely, dreamed of visiting far-away places or becoming writers, announcers, even boxers. Some of them envisioned living in the big city or, at least, a city. Undoubtedly, radio caused many youngsters to think about life beyond the bounds of their property, and it brought them into a larger community of listeners.

There are no more general stores, but radio has endured. In a world of TV, CD, DVD and iPod, it remains the oldest, yet most intimate form of communication. We may not gather around the radio like those farm boys and girls of long ago did to hear a prizefight and drink a soft drink, but radio still creates communities of listeners, despite their differences. Those farm boys tilled the earth the same way, but they were individuals with different tastes and beliefs. Yet, when they heard Joe enter the ring, none of it, for a while, mattered. On an otherwise lonely Saturday night in the 30s, that was a real knockout.